James Ponsoldt Is Building a Career on Movies Nobody Is Supposed to Make Anymore

It has to have been an overwhelming summer for James Ponsoldt. His fourth feature, The End of the Tour, has been met with both critical raves and blistering dissent, from those who object to the movie’s portrayal of David Foster Wallace. He’s watched his fellow Sundance 2013 alum Colin Trevorrow direct the year’s biggest film, Jurassic World, while the star of his previous film, Miles Teller, led the summer’s most notorious flop. He’s heard continuing awards buzz for Jason Segel’s lead performance as Wallace in his film. And, all the while, he’s been prepping The Circle, a spy thriller that will star Tom Hanks and Emma Watson and include Ponsoldt’s first-ever car-chase scene.

But there may be no one on earth less likely to reveal any stress from all that pressure than Ponsoldt, the genial, lightly Southern-accented filmmaker who has built a successful career based on being the kind of director you just want to be around. Even when The End of the Tour was announced, and when awkward camera-phone photos of Segel in costume at the Mall of America leaked online, the film got the benefit of the doubt because of Ponsoldt—both his body of work and the sense that he was the kind of guy who just wouldn’t mess this up.

“I tried to shut it off, but I can’t,” Ponsoldt says, over lunch in Manhattan, about the reaction that met the film before it was even finished. “Of course, I read everything. I can’t help it. I’m addicted to the Internet.” But, after engaging with Internet trolls to the point where many of us might have been tempted to fight back or storm off in a huff, Ponsoldt allowed himself to agree with his attackers. “I also tried to see it from other people’s point of view. I mean, there was a part of me that was like, Aw, man. They’ll see . . .”

Many viewers did see—reviews of The End of the Tourat Sundance frequently mentioned how surprised they were to embrace Segel as Wallace, or a story from the point of view of a striving reporter (David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg), or even just a movie that’s more about two guys hanging out than literary genius. Ponsoldt was surprising audiences well before then, though. “I screened the shit out of it for friends,” he says. “Early on, I was like, ‘What do you think of Jase?’ Or I was waiting for that and people were like, ‘He’s amazing.’ From early on, I was like, ‘O.K., I don't think I’m deluding myself.’”

He showed the film to director and screenwriter friends, to social workers, to “my friend who’s ex-military, who does private security and likes big, big Adam Sandler comedies.” For Ponsoldt it was important for people who’d never heard of David Foster Wallace to connect with the film. “Not everyone will have the experience of being a critically acclaimed genius novelist, but everyone, I think, at some point in their life, will get 5 minutes or 15 minutes or an afternoon with someone that they’ve idealized, romanticized, conceptualized, measured themselves against.” But, then again . . . “This movie, for some people, will be totally wrong. There’ll be some people that, for any number of reasons, it’ll just so not work for them. That’s O.K.”

That aw-shucks refusal to pat himself on the back extends to casting—“Maybe it’s insecurity, but I always feel like I’m inconveniencing people”—and even sincerely celebrating the success of friends like Trevorrow, whose Jurassic World Ponsoldt saw with his wife, eating “a shitload of candy and popcorn.” Admitting he once gave in to jealousy over movies like All the Real Girls—“. . . just being almost angry because David Gordon Green was so good and that was the movie I should have [made]”—Ponsoldt embraces the success of friends to make him “better and more honest, and to make that my version of whatever that is.” And for his billion-dollar-grossing friend Trevorrow? “I just hugged him. I was like, ‘You’re living in a dream, man.’”

The movies that Ponsoldt will make, or at least plans to, vary wildly; The Circle is an adaptation of a Dave Eggers book—putting Ponsoldt right back in those shark-infested literary waters—but also a thriller that will include C.G.I. drones. He wrote a script for the Weinstein Company to adapt the musical Pippin. And he’s still attached to Rodham, a biopic of sorts about a young Hillary Clinton working in Washington during the Watergate scandal. Current events make that one obviously tricky. “I don’t want to make movies as propaganda, for or against anyone,” he says, explaining why he wouldn’t push Rodham for a release near the 2016 election. And anyway, “If you’re going to make movies about politics, you need to aim to be as good as All the President’s Men. If you’re not aiming to be that good, if you’re not trying to be that good, what’s the fucking point?”

Ponsoldt definitely has what it takes to make a movie as good as All the President’s Men, or anything else—The Spectacular Now is one of the most honest, and sometimes brutal, on-screen depictions of teenage love since Splendor in the Grass, and The End of the Tour hones in on the details of a knotty, male sorta-friendship with a doggedness Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would probably admire. Unlike other Sundance wunderkinds of his generation, Ponsoldt’s not making the jump to big-budget superhero movie—“I see my friends get themselves in trouble when they take too much money for a movie. When the budget’s bigger than what it needs to be and then they lose control.” Instead he’s building a career on the kind of character-driven, adult-focused dramas that Hollywood supposedly doesn’t make anymore. Citing David O. Russell and Cameron Crowe as inspirations, Ponsoldt defines “real freedom and real success” as making “movies for adults; movies that studios made in the 70s. They’re not based on a preexisting comic-book character or board game or a video game or whatever.”

And before he can catch himself saying anything mean—failing to see the other side of the story, being anything but generous to anything within his chosen art form—Ponsoldt adds, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” and then praises the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Like David Foster Wallace choosing to see Broken Arrow, as he does in The End of the Tour, Ponsoldt is a guy with great taste who’s not going to let that get in the way of what’s good, no matter where he finds it.